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About Me

Ah, you don't really want to know, do you? You do? Gosh, how flattering. Well, I'm me, obviously. I'm a writer, baker of inedible cakes, mother of an indeterminate number of children (they keep moving, it's hard to count), dog owner, cat slave. Occupier of a crumbly old place in the crumbly old countryside in Yorkshire. And merciless self-publicist.

Sunday, 25 October 2015

I am inundated and I need a plastic bin to hide in.

There is only one creature on this planet that even the thought of makes me go all shivery and 'urgh' and want to run away or set about myself with a can of 'Everything killer' whilst making little squeaky noises of disgust and unpleasantness. And no, it's not Michael Macintyre.

a man I know annoys many, but I think it's mostly his poshness and wobbly hair they find irritating, and, as someone who was once accused of being 'posh' (ha!) and who has, on occasion, been the possessor of wobbly hair, I feel for him.

Actually, it's cockroaches. Blurgh. Even typing the word makes me want to go and have a shower, then spray myself with flykiller, then have another shower. I'm not sure what difference the flykiller will make, but it's the only anti-bug stuff I've got. I could spray myself with Pledge, on the grounds that any attack-cockroaches would just slide off me, but then I'd have to spend hours buffing myself up and, since I can't be bothered to polish the furniture, the chances of being sufficiently arsed to polish myself, are remote.

Anyway. Cockroaches. Blurgh.

But, coming in a close second on the 'things that I am going to eradicate from the surface of the planet and I don't care how bloody much that affects the food chain thank-you-very-much'.... slugs. Now, I've always been fairly amibivalent towards slugs, never had a particular problem with them, wouldn't want any of my daughters to marry one mind you, but since none of my daughters are invertebrates that's probably not going to happen anyway. Until. The day I opened the dog biscuit cupboard and found....

this. Gah. You have, I put it to you, never known true horror until you shove your arm into a sack of dog biscuits, only to retrieve said arm with a handful of sluggy biscuits and your arm covered in slugs. AND DO YOU KNOW HOW LONG IT TAKES TO GET THE SLIPPERY STUFF OFF? DO YOU?? They could market slug slime as a non-water-soluble lubricant, is all I'm saying. I scrubbed, people! I scrubbed with scourers, with Fairy Liquid, with hot water...and still the slime stuck. It took days before I could pull my sleeves down without my cardigan sliding off my arms.

And yes, this is indoors. Yes, it is in my kitchen. I don't use poison because I have a stupid terrier who would only eat it. But these things are in my house...

I'm now hunting for a bin to keep the dog biscuits in. But I'm afraid that, deprived of their usual diet of dog-food, the slugs will come looking for a new target, and. given the slime, they will be able to slide me out of bed and transport me to some sluggy backwater without me even waking up! One day, I'm just going to open my eyes and find myself face-to-eyestalk with some kind of sluggy Godfather figure, and then it's a very short hop to one of those horror films you see on late night telly...

4 comments:

Aaarrrggghhh! You have my deepest sympathies. In our old house, I used to wake up each morning to trails of slime weaving across the carpet in the living room. Going into the kitchen in the dark was a test of nerves, as quite often, having put the light on, I'd be confronted with a big, fat slug curled up near the fridge, or even, on one horrific occasion, climbing up the kitchen wall. We even found them in our sink! We were pretty stuck, too, having a dog who would probably eat the pellets, but we were also worried she'd attempt to eat a slug and end up with some horrible disease. In the end, we moved, although it wasn't just because of the slugs. The fact that our house seemed to have been built over a giant spiders' nest had something to do with it, as did the huge gaps in the brickwork that ensured we were paying over forty pounds a week in gas just to stop the blood freezing in our veins, never mind actually warming us up.I suspect you won't want to go as far as moving house, though. I can only suggest that you all buy hooded onesies with built in mittens and sleep with the light on. Hope this sound advice helps. :)

Sharon, yep, we too have trails all over the house, along carpets, up walls, quite regularly in the sink... but if I don't have to look at the buggers it doesn't worry me too much. It's face to face they really concern me.

And Evonne - I never have cans of polish in the house, but I could probably borrow some from next door if I had to keep the cockroaches out. And that is a sentence I hope never to have to write again...